wild goose chase
a slight miscalculation
A grid of twenty stones was laid out on the beach. Twenty stones in rows of five, laid out like some ancient tribal artifact on the foam-flecked sand. Twenty stones, and the people who walked by stopped and looked and asked each other “What is this? What does it mean? Why is it here on this beach on this day?”
Stones, it’s been said, are mute teachers and the lesson we learn from them is the impossibility of communication. The people who stop and look at the stones, those men and women and children, have been speaking all their adult lives and still find it hard to make themselves understood, even by those they are closest to. “What is this?” they ask. “What does it mean?”
Twenty stones laid out on the dark beach, a lesson taught without words on the uselessness of words. A lesson as solid and permanent as the stones themselves. And yet soon the tide will wash in and scatter the grid, shift the stones, eventually drag them away. In a day, a week, a year the beach will be stoneless. Nobody will ask “What is this?” of an empty beach. Nobody will ask “What does it mean?”
And that’s another lesson.
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